Andrew: Welcome. Thank you all so much for coming to this talk that Davidya and I are holding. It’s our first live conversation. Many of you have probably seen our pre-recorded talks on YouTube, and we both felt it would be nice to have the opportunity for us to be here together in real time and to explore some of the subjects that we’ve already explored and then open it up for questions and answers at the end.
So I’m here with my friend David “Davidya” Buckland. David is an author. He has a book called Our Natural Potential, where he explores the stages of enlightenment. He also has a blog called davidya.ca, where he explores the stages of enlightenment, but also explores different themes that relate to the unfoldment of awakening and how that shows up in daily life. He is someone that I would consider to be a great seer of our age. He has a capacity for cognition and shares that gift freely through exploring the details of the unfoldment of creation from a Vedic perspective. I’m very grateful for his friendship and for the opportunity to be here with him today. So thank you so much, David, for taking the time.
David: You’re very welcome. Thank you, Andrew.
A: Thank you. And I’m Andrew Hewson. I’m a spiritual teacher. I teach the path of non-dual devotion, which is a path which emphasizes the devotion to truth, the love of love. I speak to four primary pillars of spiritual expression and have the honor and the privilege of witnessing the unfoldment of divine reality. So today David and I are going to be speaking about this unfoldment, the stages of enlightenment, what I refer to as contextual modalities, And we’re going to look at how healing and transmutation relate to this process.
As we move into this, I just invite everyone to notice the silence that’s already here. And during the speaking, during the conversing, the exploration, just allow what is underneath the words to make itself known. We can walk into this from the heart, from an openness, a willingness, and just rest in this presence as David and I explore together.
So David, would you like to start? We’re going to just go over the basic initial shift, the awakening, and then explore how that unfolds through the stages and modalities.
D: Sure. It’s good to first add a little context. There’s kind of a duality in the process, we could say, sometimes described as Shiva and Shakti, or the masculine and feminine aspects. Essentially, or in Vedic terms, it’s Atman and Sattva.
Essentially, it’s the unfolding of consciousness to itself and the refinement of perception and awakening heart, so that all the layers between the surface experience and that inner reality, our inner nature, our true nature, come into awareness. So it’s not just about consciousness, it’s about all of it coming together and waking up to itself.
So the first shift in the Vedic model that I base my model on is known as “Cosmic Consciousness” or Self-Realization. And that’s essentially where that inner presence or witness, observer, wakes up to itself through this body-mind. So sometimes the witness value can come online prior to awakening, and sometimes it comes online with the shift. But essentially we fall back into a kind of observer mode and there’s a fundamental duality. Sometimes Self-Realization is framed in terms of non-duality because there’s an inner sense of non-duality and the outer world may be experienced as illusory or a detached, less meaningful part of reality. And so it’s kind of dismissed, but it’s actually the fundamental nature of that experience is of a duality of Self within and outer world experience, content.
And then the next shift that tends to happen in this process is that we realize that there’s kind of a screen behind the world appearance that is also consciousness, and that that is same consciousness as within. So there’s kind of a merging of the subject-object dynamic.
And consciousness itself has a threefold nature. There’s the observer value, the observed, the appearance, the objects of the world. And then there’s the process of experience between them. Where the quality of intelligence is dominant. And it’s where the laws of nature are functioning, essentially creating the experiences that we’re having in this process.
That’s actually one of the qualities of Self-Realization is we realize, we thought we were the doer and tried to control our life experience and so on, resisting what we don’t want and grasping what we want. But with the shift that falls away and we realize that we’re not the doer, we’re the observer of the things that are happening. And, so there’s a refinement process that can happen in there if there is sufficient sattva or healing, refinement going on.
And that unfolds a process and an ideal scenario between that initial shift and the Unity shift where the two come together is a process known as Refined Cosmic Consciousness or God Consciousness or Celestial Consciousness. It has various names but where the essentially that inner, those inner values of refinement and the subtle nature of becoming become apparent, so one of the things can happen is when we wake up, we realize we’re not the doer so what is the doer? Who or what’s doing? How is this the world around us? How are these experiences happening? And that can help lead us into that refinement and perception of the mechanics of the world around us.
So that’s the God Consciousness stage and then there’s the Unity stage and then a Refined value. So these are kind of masculine and feminine processes essentially. There’s the Shiva value, the observer wakes up to itself, then it wakes up to the quality in the world. And then there’s the feminine part of the process, the Shakti value, where we’re experiencing the values of the world, the awakening heart. Now this isn’t the Anahata heart chakra kind of a thing, that can happen during the rise. This is kind of like a higher heart value where we’re waking up to much deeper values of universal love and capacity.
And then there’s a refined value of Unity where those qualities, if they’ve been developing prior, are now unfolding in a new context of Unity. And there’s essentially Unity unfolds in stages itself, sub-stages you could say, because there’s a, that process of integrating everything in that one wholeness takes time. I mean, there’s that initial recognition that the Self of the world and the the Self within are the same and they collapse together into one wholeness, but then there’s a whole lot of other layers to the experience and our memories and, you know, distant parts of the universe beyond our experience and so forth, beyond our perception, that all gradually come together into one wholeness.
So it’s kind of like this process of experience and become taking place, recognizing we are already. At a certain point in this process, and this is a real kind of Coles Notes brief overview, at a certain point in that process we come to be aware of the totality of awareness in some value.
There’s the, essentially, consciousness is aware of itself globally and at every point within itself. And once that’s known sufficiently, there’s a number of ways that the recognition can happen. But for example, consciousness has been looking in on itself this whole time, awareness aware of itself. And once it’s fully aware of itself, there’s kind of this thing where we can turn and look beyond consciousness, which is a bit of a, at the time, could be quite unexpected, because there’s that sense of consciousness being infinite and eternal and who I am and the ultimate reality and the source of all, and then we see beyond it, essentially what they call in the Sanskrit context, Brahman, it means the Great, and it’s referred to in some of the texts as the Supreme Awakening, because we essentially wake up from our prior enlightenment, and that, it’s quite a shift in perspective.
And then there’s kind of a Refined version of that that can unfold also. And then there’s a kind of a coming together of the two sides of the masculine and feminine process into one totality known as Parabrahman, which means beyond Brahman, which kind of seems, beyond the beyond, you know, the source of the source, it has a number of ways of, are being framed, but it’s essentially pure Divinity.
Just as we came to pure consciousness in the process of unfolding, the awakening process in Samadhi or deep meditation, and then with awakening to that, we can experience these qualities of pure consciousness without content, then we can get a value of pure Divinity in there.
So that’s kind of a quick overview. There’s a lot of detail. I have a whole book on it.
A: Yeah, that’s right. You do have a wonderful point of reference that everyone can check out, so we’re very grateful for that. I’ll just kind of do a similar brief overview, just to give a little bit of a different perspective and some different languaging.
So I also recognize and speak often about the masculine/feminine distinction. This is what I refer to as the primary distinction between pure awareness, the silent, changeless, pure perceiving of this field, and conscious presence, the vibrant, full, conscious aliveness of the Self.
So I have had the opportunity to witness a different type of initial shift which you and I have also explored in our previous conversations, where the feminine aspect is actually waking up to itself first. And so in this case, or in these cases, what’s taking place is the vibrant, full, conscious aliveness of this field is becoming, is recognizing itself and becoming thicker and thicker in what appears to be sort of a progressive substantiation, which includes the recognition of itself and the appearances of form and different flows or different movements, different activity, and then flowering into the seeing of itself as itself.
In this case, or in these cases, or multiple cases that are unfolding like this, and that’s also the way that it unfolded here. But what takes place is then there’s a clicking into the masculine aspect after the feminine aspect has already realized itself or recognized itself. And so this shows up as a clicking into the pure silent seeing of the vibrant full conscious aliveness. And there can be lots of variation in the midst of this, as you just said.
One of the things that we’ve also spoken about is how there can be a stage or a phase or a period where there is more of an emphasis on the recognition of what’s not here, and that is oftentimes referred to as “no self” with a lowercase s. And so in this period, there is a sense of being emptied out. Everything that seemed to be the case before is seen through. And this really pertains to the shifting on the mental level of identification and conceptualization and superimposition, at least in the…
D: Self-concepts. Yeah, our self-concepts.
A: Exactly. Now this oftentimes gets mistaken as being the ultimate sort of shift, and so there are certain non-dual understandings that push this or put this forward as what it’s all about, and in that context oftentimes limit the capacity to hear about stages or modalities or continued development. So it’s important to take note of that and also to recognize that that generally doesn’t involve or include this field of Divine Light actually seeing itself as itself.
There is more just a sense of there not being a self and the world can appear relatively the same, apart from the fact that all of the meaning and value and significance that correlated with this limited sense of self, also is rendered insubstantial. And there’s different ways in which that can show up as well. So I described this feminine style shift.
And then there’s also the masculine shift where that silent changeless pure awareness is waking up to itself and it is seeing itself as that underlying seeing, that pure seeing of all of the three-dimensional presentations and formations and the play of activity.
Now we’ve also spoken about how, according to the degree of egoic density, or according to the degree of the, how would we say, the clarity of the conscious experiencing, there’s going to be differentiation in the way in which the world is held. And that’s not something that’s fixed either, that can shift. You’ve described it through the context of the gunas.
And those different qualitative filters that are still present even in an authentic shift or an authentic awakening because they make up the basic structuring of conscious experiencing.
D: Yeah, it’s useful to note here that the underlying process is the same for everybody, but there is a huge variation in the subjective experience of that. Yes. And there’s a number of, you know, you mentioned the gunas and the primary, that primary masculine- feminine duality we’ve talked about. But there’s quite a few different kinds of things that can influence the, you know, our background and orientation, you know, the type of physiology we have and all kinds of things.
A: Yes, yes, very helpful points there, David.
D: Yeah, and that’s where it’s important to understand the broader process so that we don’t get in the way of it, essentially, because we can have concepts that you know, oh, there’s only this one awakening and anything else is an illusion. You know, I’ve had people come to me, objecting to the idea that there’s more, and then coming back later when they realized that… they thought they were losing their awakening because it was changing and becoming something else and then they realized that actually there was more and it was moving further.
A: Yeah, really beautiful, really beautiful points. I call that qualitative consistency. So irrespective of the tradition, irrespective of the unique way in which the process unfolds, there is an underlying general qualitative consistency that is present in the process and in the different shifts.
And that’s what you and I tend to speak about, is that qualitative consistency, not to the exclusion of the uniqueness, but to the recognition that it’s one essential intelligence that is unfolding as this. And this is verifiable irrespective of the tradition.
It has unfolded in many different ways, in many different cultural contexts, and it has been spoken about in different settings. And that doesn’t mean that there aren’t unique cognitions and unique flavors and unique ways in which conscious experiencing or conscious awareness holds itself and sees itself mechanically, structurally, so on and so forth. But that general underlying qualitative consistency is recognizable, irrespective of the unique flavor or the unique contextualization of the process.
D: Yeah, and that uniqueness is actually an essential part of the process. When you see that consciousness in its global nature, it is already globally self-aware, but there’s all these point values, one of which is this body-mind expression. And the point of having all these different apparent separate people is so that they can have different perspectives of the one whole.
And it’s all of us together that create the totality of self-knowing.
A: Beautiful.
D: So it’s built into the system for us to have a unique process and to have a unique perspective. But in the context, if we understand the underlying process, then we can easily support our unique unfolding.
A: Yes, very, very beautiful points. Again, I also find that sometimes there’s a, there can be an over-emphasis on the uniqueness, that potentially limits the sort of the alignment with the underlying qualitative consistency. And I think you and I have both I’ve seen cases like this, where the spiritual ego gets involved in the uniqueness and there can be different blind spots or self-limiting conclusions or how would we say, sort of movements away from the general underlying intelligence through an over-emphasis on the particularity of the way in which something is unfolding.
D: Now sometimes it’s not about ego, it’s about the person only referring to their own experience. And my experience is this, and so this is the way it is. But it’s a little tricky when you generalize and say my experience is everyone’s experience, because that’s when you can run into issues like we narrow it too far or don’t understand the underlying process.
A: Yes.
D: For example, sometimes when people wake up, it usually comes with some purification and some opening. And sometimes people have a flashier kind of awakening. Sometimes it’s very quiet and ordinary, but sometimes there’s a bit of flash that comes with it. And then they can confuse the flash with the awakening. But the awakening is that shift in consciousness within, and the flash and the purification are side effects. That’s not the actual awakening. And confusing the two is, or confusing them, is, you can get misled by that.
A: Yes. Yeah. Very beautiful points again. I also find that it’s helpful just to clarify the languaging. When I use the term ego, I’m typically referring to a centralization of subjectivity. And so what you’re describing is basically just that subjectivity that is this one self. And the tendency for subjectivity to project its own conclusion or its own recognition of itself as being what’s going on out there. So when we have this understanding that there is a broader
underlying general consistency, then that enables us to flexibly accommodate the uniqueness and the details without losing the underlying intelligence.
And of course there’s various extremes there, you could go too far into the details, which is what I was attempting to describe there, or you could go too far into the generality. So this kind of is similar to the masculine feminine on some level, we might say, but there is a balance, there’s a fine balance that makes itself known or reveals itself, and in that we’re able to coherently be with both the uniqueness and the underlying consistency in a way which is in alignment with the whole.
So that, there’s just a couple other points I wanted to make around the basic unfoldment of the modalities because there’s another distinction that I’ve noticed in reference to the Beyond Consciousness shift that, as you call it, or what I refer to as Supreme Nothingness.
There’s a modality that I qualify called Source Awareness, where there’s a recognition of that quality-less, attribute-less source value actually prior to the unification of the masculine and feminine values of Divine light. So that’s pure, silent, changeless awareness and full, vibrant, conscious presence. And in that Source Awareness there can be what shows up as almost a a triple layering. So there’s a recognition of both the feminine and masculine aspect but they haven’t unified quite yet. And there’s also what you might refer to as a taste of Brahman or a recognition of that quality-less totality but it hasn’t recognized itself as itself and so therefore it’s not the great awakening but it’s a little bit of a precursor or a foresight. And there’s variation there as well. I have seen it.
I’ve observed cases where, it’s almost as if through looking back at that qualityless totality, there is the definition or the sort of, how would we say, the proclaiming of I to be that, the reality to be that. But that shift hasn’t taken place to where you’re looking from that into the field of conscious awareness.
So it still seems that there’s a looking back instead of that being there being a shift in the identity from within the field of conscious awareness to beyond it. Yeah?
D: Yeah.
A: And that’s the Supreme Nothingness shift or what I often call the void or Supreme Nothingness.
D: Yeah, a similar thing can happen with initial awakening too, where we’re very aware of the Self and even the sense of that is who I am, but the identification can still be with the personal self.
A: Yes.
D: And so it hasn’t let go yet to become the cosmic Self. And there’s a value, particularly if there’s a bunch of witnessing going on prior to actual awakening.
I’ve seen some people who consider themselves awake simply because they’re witnessing, and yet don’t recognize that there’s still that identification in there, which kind of constrains it. It’s like a flavor of awakening, but it’s not the full thing yet.
A: Yeah, I’m really glad you brought that up because in these feminine shifts that I’ve been observing and was describing earlier, because of the progressive building of it, it being more of a climactic sort of flowering or unfolding, there’s oftentimes intense field recognition, vibrant fullness, while there still is identification with the body-mind.
And that reaches a threshold point where there is a definite shift, but unlike a masculine shift, it doesn’t have that clean click kind of promptness to it. So, for those that are experiencing more of that vibrant aliveness, becoming conscious of itself, seeing itself and that building the thickening of that. It is still, it’s unfolding. It’s flowering, but it just tends to be a little bit more on the
progressive side a little bit more on the climactic sort of unfoldment side.
D: Yeah, and the current time to where we’ve got a lot of people that are waking up and it’s kind of, it’s the universal consciousness is waking up to itself. So it’s this progressive, it lifts all boats, so to speak. And so everybody is drawn up with that. So that’s creating a lot of side effects and purification in the collective, but it’s also allowing that kind of thing to take place.
I think a few decades ago, you wouldn’t have seen that simply because the collective wouldn’t have supported. Well, there might’ve been some exceptions, but it would have been nowhere near as easy for that kind of refinement to unfold within the context of the whole, ’cause we’re all, you know, we’re in this environment, in this collective together.
So it’s a, yeah, so it’s a beautiful thing.
A: It is very beautiful, yeah. And just to kind of emphasize that point, in this context, there is a heavy emphasis on healing, or what I call transmutation, which is essentially the conversion of latent, unresolved energy. back into that vibrant aliveness, that blissful conscious existence.
And there’s also more of a devotional approach.So, you know, those tend to be supportive within that style of unfoldment as well.
D: Yeah, it might be useful at this point to just touch on the gunas really briefly.
A: Sure.
D: And we can talk about that process a little bit. There’s a few ways of looking at it. But essentially there’s everything has a combination of three fundamental fundamental qualities. And there, one tends to be dominant though in any given whatever physiology, object, whatever context.
And the first is known as Tamas, which essentially is very similar to the idea of inertia. It’s kind of a tendency to be fixed and not to want to change. and be rigid, and it also has a tendency to give a quality of shadow, especially in this kind of context.
And then I mentioned earlier about sattva, it’s like the feminine side of the process, it’s purity and clarity, essentially. So they’re kind of a polarity.
And then between them there’s rajas, which is somewhat akin to fire. It’s essentially the process of transformation. So you’re transforming between one or the other. So the spiritual process is a lot about transforming Tamas into Sattva, and that transformation process. So one of the ways that shows up is in healing, and the integration of openings and a variety of kinds of things in the process.
But of course it also goes the other way too, you can take purity and turn it into inertia. And we need some value of all of them. If we didn’t have any Tamas, there would be no form, and there would be no mechanism, no way of experiencing things and going through this process.
For consciousness to know itself, because when you just have pure consciousness by itself, there’s no content, there’s nothing to experience except itself. There’s not much you can learn about yourself in that. I mean, there’s certainly powerful things you can learn about your essential nature, but beyond that…
Another little detail that’s worth mentioning from what you were talking about there is the distinction between the masculine and feminine processes in there with that initial awakening and the Unity shift and the Brahman shift. There are shifts in relationship of consciousness with itself and they start with an initial recognition or realization, realizing, Self realizing itself through the person, for example, in Self-Realization.
And then there’s an integration and unfolding process and greater and greater maturity. It kind of gradually moves out into the more and more expressed levels of this form until, it’s kind of a maturing process for each stage. Whereas the feminine process is more a gradual refinement with a climactic realization, like at the peak of Refined Unity, there can be, if there’s an unfolding feminine process that’s very active at the peak of Refined Unity, there can be what’s known as God-Realization, where we’ve initially recognized the hand of the divine, however you want to frame that, the intelligence that’s taking place in the world and in the apparent chaos of the events turn out to have a guiding hand, so to speak, and there’s all this intelligence and the laws of nature that are involved in everything around us.
And then that can unfold into an awareness of those laws of nature in a more personalized way, where we can actually experience them as subtle beings. And every culture around the world has various names for those kinds of things like devas and angels and whatnot.
And then further still, is this recognition of the divine itself. And that’s another one of those things that’s unique to each person, is how we relate to the divine, because the divine is so vast and like it’s everything all at once, all time, all space, all and more. And so to relate to that, we usually relate to it in a point way, just the way we relate to another person or something like that. And so we tend to have what in the Vedas they call an Ishta Devata or a preferred form of the divine that we relate best to. And there’s gazillions of examples of that the world over, as well.
And so there’s a process there where we come to recognize, realization. I use the word realization in the sense of recognizing we are. So there’s a realization that we are God. Not that we’re all of it simultaneously, but that we’re kind of like a point value or or a wave of expression of the divine. And we’re not separate from that. So there’s what’s known as God Realization.
And that can happen before the Brahman shift or happen later on, depending. I’ve seen a number of people have the refinement process take place later on in the process, but it’s changing, you know, there’s a lot of incredible evolution taking place.
I mean, some of what we’re talking about, like pure Divinity, didn’t even come up. It’s like even the references in the old texts were not well recognized for a long, long time. It’s a really recent development.
A: That’s a good point for me to kind of just come in on, in reference to subjectivity. We were just discussing it a little bit earlier, how there’s a tendency for there to be a projection or an assumption or sort of an interpretation from the subjective perspective.
Now, when I speak about subjectivity, I’m speaking about supreme subjectivity, and that is this field of conscious awareness itself. That’s what enables you or shines forth as your sense of being the subject to all that appears to unfold. So this one supreme subject being of the nature of pure intelligence itself, whatever it holds itself to be, whatever it takes itself to be, it tends to see itself in those terms. It tends to see that in the world or as the world.
And on some level this also relates to the gunas, but in the context of pure Divinity, you say that you accurately point out that it’s not something that has been a common degree of unfoldment until fairly recently now. There are many that may feel that that’s inaccurate and say, “Well, this so-and-so was in pure Divinity, and this one was, and my teacher was in pure Divinity, and all of this.” And so they’re taking different contextual modalities or different stages of enlightenment and interpreting them as pure Divinity. That happens quite a bit.
One thing that’s also important to recognize is that oftentimes the process stops at a certain stage. It stops at a certain modality for the whole lifetime, and it doesn’t continue to unfold any further.
That stage or that recognition is complete in itself. It has a sense of completeness and it is a certain qualitative recognition of infinity
within itself. And it perhaps has a certain degree of appropriateness in a context, a karmic context, you know, the coalescing of experiencing into a presentation or a representation which is most in alignment with the whole.
So there’s all kinds of different factors that go into the way in which this field unfolds within itself. And there’s an intelligence, as you said, there’s a hand at work in that. Then there’s also the potential for sort of self-limitation through a lack of understanding or a lack of motivation or whatever the case may be that also can potentially arise.
D: Yeah, it’s interesting. There are some traditions who recognize stages, but they won’t talk about them because it’ll create concepts that can be a barrier to living them, because we get this idea that, “Oh, this is how awakening is supposed to happen. It’s supposed to look like this.” And then it unfolds differently, but you know, as we mentioned, it’s common for it to be all kinds of variations in that process, even though it’s the same underlying process. And so, yeah, I mean, when I first shifted, I had all these concepts of what it was supposed to be like, and of course, didn’t meet any of those concepts, because the mind can’t really conceive of something that hasn’t arisen yet. So, but at the same time, do you deny a person a map for the road that they’re on?
A: Yes.
D: You know, you don’t want to go, you know, if you’re in Paris, it’s not really that useful to look too closely at a map of New York. But if you’re flying to New York, then it’s very valuable, very, very valuable. Because I’ve seen that whole areas of experience that weren’t recognized as being there, unfolding once they were aware they were there. Even I think it’s in the seventh mandala of the Rig Veda, the core of the Vedic texts, the sage Vasishtha noted the importance of desiring the Unity shift after awakening. But you’re not going to desire Unity if you don’t know it’s there.
A: Yes.
D: And it’s not a desire in the same way of a seeker would be craving after enlightenment, but just the intention that, you know, not to stop. So it’s this kind of this dance. I mean, talking about stages creates concepts and even, you know, even though you try not to, and but not talking about stages also creates concepts, because that’s the nature of the mind. So it’s useful to have better concepts, I guess you can say, and, but hold them lightly you know, not to take them too seriously and just to recognize that you know, your own process will be your own process.
A: Yes, very very important and I’ve found that one of the major flows of intelligence that can be supportive surrounding the tendency to over conceptualize or move into trying to define or conclude, is devotion and the willingness to surrender, the willingness to give way into this greater intelligence without knowing all the details, without having it all figured out, you know? And even when we directly cognize certain details and that’s a clear experiential reality, we come to a threshold point where we’re called to surrender that as well, you know, to offer that back as well.
And this is just a flow of perpetual surrender that is unfolding. We all have this, I feel that we all have within us this profound willingness, this profound willingness that is moving to be born, you know, moving to be born through us. And that willingness is stretching into itself, leaning into itself, discovering the profound power of itself.
And we can’t have it all figured out. We can’t have all of our things checked off and everything in a row the way we want it because the process is not something that is…
D: We’re not doing it.
A: We’re not doing it, yes.
D: Essentially it’s the need of the time and it’s all in the context of the whole. It’s not about you, it’s not personal, so it’s not going to happen when it’s convenient for you or when you want it necessarily. I mean having a desire is, the intention is helpful but not to be too craving about it, it’s just another attachment. But yeah, it’s all about the whole and what’s unfolding to the whole and when it’s the right time for this person to wake up to support that whole and then this person has a, it’s essentially we have these moments of grace arise and they’re kind of like opportunities and if we’re willing to allow those, to surrender to those moments of grace, then those shifts can happen but if we resist that then that opportunity passes and perhaps it goes to someone else, some other point value, because it’s time for that next step of opening.
And it’s all being really beautifully orchestrated so that lots of purification can take place, but not so much that we all go a little bonkers or the world starts falling apart or something. We need to be able to unfold in a process where we’re integrating as we go and moving through this in a systematic way, you know, just like you don’t go into to start school in grade one and get calculus. You’re going to have to work, you know, work through arithmetic and mathematics and so on like that and develop that process. And so it develops based on the need.
And I saw that, you know, even with when writing the book, I came to the last chapter and all I had was quotes, because that stage hadn’t unfolded here yet. And then I was shown that, there’s kind of this pattern, the awakening, God consciousness, Unity has a very similar pattern with Brahman, Refined Brahman and Parabrahman. There are certain qualities, so like Unity has stages, Parabrahman has stages. And I had never seen those described, but it just kind of came out, and I sort of knew what they were, even though they hadn’t unfolded here yet.
And it was essentially the new, the time the book was coming out and that information was needed. And before that had fully unfolded. And then that process began in that point. And so it’s kind of like this guided thing, showing what’s needed to be unfolded and you know, what’s, this stuff shows up that, and I write these articles for my blog, for example, they kind of show up and I don’t know why I’m writing about this or or whatever, it seems kind of irrelevant or it’s not that important, whatever and then it’s exactly what somebody needed to hear and so on, yeah, just everything happens in the right time and through that guiding hand of Divinity.
A: yeah yeah very very nice points. It’s interesting because when things were unfolding here, I was kind of looking out at the spiritual marketplace or on YouTube. I wasn’t a spiritual seeker per se in the way that most are, looking for enlightenment. By the time that I heard non-duality, it was already shining forth as a reality. But I saw that there was a sort of, just a what appeared to be, at least a lack of depth and detail you know and at least where I was looking I, of course wasn’t looking everywhere but in what seemed to be generally available.
And it also became clear that there is something, you know that divinity is moving to, you know, present itself, to make itself known, to shine forth in a way that perhaps has been concealed largely, even in the context of spiritual awakening and degrees of realization in our history, or at least in what’s commonly spoken about and presented.
And of course, there’s exceptions to that rule. I know you came from a background where stages were openly expressed, and I had the opportunity to be exposed to that understanding. And it also came as a knowingness, you know, in the midst of the unfoldment.
But there can be this tendency to look at awakening as a solution to a problem. And I think that that’s one of the most pervasive ideas in the marketplace, you know, which then makes the sense of being a person a problem, and the initial shift a solution, and that tends to sort of glorify the initial shift and present it as being some kind of end-all be-all of any kind of difficulties, because when there’s no separation, there’s no difficulty.
D: This goal, you know, it’s like buying a house and getting married
and getting enlightened. I mean, I had it on my own goals list when I was younger.
(laughing)
But really it’s a platform for living life. It’s not a goal or a piece of content in itself. It’s a way of living life from a more, a much bigger place basically.
A: And it’s for the glorification of Divinity. That’s one of the major themes that comes through here and I just feel is so fundamental
is that it’s not about someone being realized, someone being, there’s no one at a particular stage. That stage is at itself. It is itself.
D: Yes.
A: Yeah.
D: It’s the Self waking up to itself, but we’re waking up from the person. It’s not the person that wakes up.
A: Yes.
D: And so I refer to them as post-personal stages ’cause it’s kind of-
A: Post-personal.
D: ‘Cause there are these stages of personal development
and then we go beyond that into post-personal development.
A: Yes, exactly. So we’re living from what I refer to as a contextual modality, that modality of existence which is defined in being the infinite context for all that appears on the level of content. And we’re seeing from there.
And just kind of going back to what you were talking about surrounding different degrees of integration, I find it helpful to look at each stage or modality as unfolding in a five-phase developmental process which need not be figured out or categorized or anything, but it’s retrospectively supportive and sometimes in the immediacy it can be helpful.
And that starts with the recognition of reality in a more essential or fundamental vantage point from the one that previously seemed to be dominant. Then there’s a transcendence of that previously dominant recognition of reality. And then there’s a stabilization of infinity in that new perspective, in that new condition, in that new modality.
Then that begins the process of unification. Now this is not the unification that is referential to the unification of the masculine and feminine aspects, although that is something to be addressed and definitely a part of the unfoldment, but this could take place at any stage or any modality, even if it’s just purely masculine, and that unification is essentially a movement for there to be a unification of the discrepancies between the previous recognition of reality and the new or fresh recognition of reality.
And so as that is unified, there’s also an integration, and that means that that condition is more clearly reflected in the functioning of the body and the mind. So the nervous system is more clearly reflecting the condition, it’s more clearly reflecting that new vantage point, that new perspective of the whole within itself. You know, it’s recognized itself at this particular qualitative status or at this particular qualitative modality.
And now that is integrated into the functioning of the body and the mind or the flow of experiencing. And there’s different ways in which that shows up as well.
D: Yeah, it’s kind of like there’s all those layers between consciousness and the surface, like I mentioned, and each of them is progressively more dense as you go up, wherever, or out, or whatever. And each of them does take a little longer to be infused and then integrated and so on.
And so, yeah, mind usually kind of like, you know, like when I first shifted, I had no idea what had happened. It was completely clear that my perspective had changed completely, but I had no idea what it was, because it didn’t match any concepts.
And it just kind of integrated a little bit, and then the mind kind of caught up a few days later. Just the sense of what it was became obvious as well, as it integrated.
A: Very nice. And that’s another thing too that you and I both are often speaking about is how this is it, there’s no sort of final point. There’s no ending point that we’re moving towards. I would consider this condition here to be in the unification and integration phases of pure Divinity, but that is not something that has a completion point. It’s perpetual.
D: Well, there is this potential end point, but it’s so theoretical. I mean, because essentially you would be, you know, if you read, for example, the Yoga Sutra, you have, you know, descriptions of being able to, you know, make your body any size, mastery over the elements, being able to fly, and turn invisible and all this other stuff. I mean, essentially your physiology would be completely under your control, I guess you could say. It’s a master of your entire reality and I don’t know that it’s even supported in the current consciousness. It would take hundreds of years to get to that kind of place.
But there’s a massive amount of room prior to that where we can make huge qualitative improvements in our quality of life and the quality of life of those around us and so forth.
A: Yes, that’s another thing. Go ahead.
D: Yeah, one of the things that happens as we become more and more universal in this process is that the purification process becomes more and more universal as well. And so we’re purifying not a person anymore, we’re purifying the whole collective. And so the more and more people that are deeply integrated and awake, the more and more they’re healing the collective as well, not just their old baggage, the whole thing.
A: Very beautiful, yes. So the unification and the integration supports the whole, because it is the whole that is realizing itself and realizing its pure Divinity. So there’s a natural and spontaneous flow of intelligence which begins to resolve unresolved material at deeper and deeper levels. Of course, that does include the seemingly individuated accumulation, but then that also begins to branch out into more collective levels of accumulation or condensation. And it’s important to note here that that’s a spontaneous organic natural affair. It’s not something that we’re doing per se, you know. It just becomes the nature of the way in which the conscious experiencing is flowing. When there is a greater degree of openness, there’s a tendency for that which is not finding release or resolution in areas of closeness to move towards that degree of openness.
And so in a certain sense there’s a collective release valve or conversion unit that begins to develop and, that requires and also correlates with a certain degree of embodied reflection or integration. So, whenever we talk about resolution or transmutation or healing, we’re always talking about embodiment, we’re always talking about integration. And in cases where there seems to be a lack of embodiment or a lack of integration, that’s because it hasn’t moved down into those deeper levels of unresolved material, which then naturally begins to reflect as the refinement of the neurophysiology.
And what we’re seeing is that this nervous system isn’t as limited and local as we once thought that it was. We’re recognizing different values of the body itself, the body as infinity, and that changes according to the contextual modality or the stage of enlightenment. So at a certain point, it’s no longer a local body that is being refined, but it’s a non-local, infinite body that is in that process of unification, integration, and embodiment.
D: Yeah, the cosmic body is the way I talk about on the blog. Yeah, the body as cosmic. And it’s an interesting thing because you come to experience that you’re functioning on multiple levels simultaneously. You have the body washing dishes and then there’s the cosmic body kind of doing stuff and it’s just all kind of different layers of things happening simultaneously.
A: Beautiful. Yeah, that’s another point that we’ve also gone over before and you kind of of touched on there and when you were talking about Refined Unity and what I would refer to as Dynamic Subjectivity, where there is that collapsing of the distinction of the
masculine and feminine into one singular Self and the flow of experiencing and the lively, blissful intelligence comes online in a new way.
In that period or in that phase, there is the possibility of recognizing this cosmic value of the body or the body as infinity…
D: the body of all bodies
A: the body of all bodies, yes exactly and that also has different possibilities, for instance, there’s what I call avataric bodies the Krishna body, the Buddha body, the Christ body, and these are there almost like watermarks within the Self that have been left by avataric degrees of realization yes, and so we encounter those and we can merge with those and realize those as ourself.
And the Self is seeing that it always was Krishna. It always was Christ. It always was Buddha, you know, and different sages and saints and so on and so forth, but it’s never anything personal.
So if there’s unresolved identification residue, you know, there’s potential for there to be misinterpretation or self-limitation surrounding such cognitions or degrees of realization.
But when that flow of healing and transmutation and resolution is unfolding, then we recognize these as the only one that could ever recognize it. And that is the same one that was itself the devotee and that to which the devotion was flowing simultaneously. It’s just a shift in the perspective.
And then it becomes progressively more inclusive. Now, that’s only one particular, like we’ve said, that’s only referential to a particular modality, and there’s different degrees of realization, the realization of the body even in pure Divinity, which we could go over the stages of pure divinity if you want. I don’t know if you want to go into that, but how that kind of shows up or unfolds, at least the beginning of it.
D: yeah, I’m not sure how to, I mean, going into the details, it’s kind of not entirely meaningful. Unless there’s some context, but it’s essentially, it’s like, the whole, the physiology becomes immersed. I mean, the physiology, again, we’re talking about here is cosmic, but, the physiology becomes immersed in divinity. And divinity isn’t, in this context, isn’t a thing or an object of experience and that kind of stuff in the same way. It’s kind of hard to put it into any kind of language. I mean, it’s beyond Brahman and Brahman as, you know, how do you talk about Brahman? Right.
Sometimes people use the neti-neti thing, you know, not this, not this, but essentially it, you become immersed in in Divinity and it’s kind of like being filled up with white light in a certain kind of way, but it’s a much more advanced white light than a prior one that can unfold. And so it’s kind of like the values rise up to higher and higher values.
A: Yes.
D: So you get the, yeah, I’d have to look it up actually. the words for the qualities, but it kind of moves up through. And one of the things that happened here too was that when it reached a certain level, it essentially, I was immersing the Devas that were universal laws of nature, that were running the cosmic body. And it’s like their way of spiritual awakening.
And it was kind of like there was a immersing them in Divinity triggered their awakening and in their style and it was kind of like, almost like it was a local thing that then falls back into the universal, and it triggered a huge wave of purification. Not in a negative way but it just wasn’t you know rough purification or anything like that.
It was just stirring up dust, so to speak. And yeah, that’s still going on.
A: Yes, that’s still going on.
D: Yeah, every so often the dust kind of clears for a moment, I realize, oh, there’s been some progress and it’s showing up here now and so on. And so the stages are gradually unfolding. But it’s quite distinct from anything I’ve, you know, prior in the process.
A: Yes, it can be quite intense. I would say comparatively to the modalities pre-Pure Divinity, it was sort of very smooth and kind of a little bit less intense in the context of that surfacing or purification. So it’s also important to note here that just like in the initial shift, you know, that is oftentimes deified as being an ending or some sort of a finality or goal, which, you know, has arisen through different strategic presentations, perhaps expedient means, you know, from different teachers throughout the ages and the density of the age and time period and so on and so forth. But, so there’s a realization that there’s more there and then there’s unfoldment through different modalities or stages but then again with pure Divinity there’s a similar sort of new beginning if you will where then we’re entering into that deepening.
Divinity is entering into a deepening of the unfoldment of its reality within itself and I would say that this is where I move from qualifying it as unification into Divinization and so what we begin to witness is the Divinization of the nonlinear body, the Divinization of creation, the Divinization of the gunas even, the Divinization of the elements, you know, all of this is unfolding as Divinity and it is not an achievement for some one and it’s for the glorification of Divinity within itself. So Divinity is glorifying itself.
D: Yeah, because if the laws of nature are waking up, they’re not, you know, personal. They’re everybody’s, you know, so it’s a whole other layer of awakening that’s taking place in the collective.
A: Yes.
D: It’s quite a remarkable process and I’m really enjoying watching the unfolding. We have been through this period, though, in the last couple of years where there’s been a lot of purification in the collective. it’s kind of like you’re in that. It’s not like it’s out there somewhere. It’s essentially the environment you’re in. And so of course there’s the old thing about the sages are working to awaken the world because that’s them too. You know, it’s not like it’s a separate thing.
And so the more the world awakens, the greater the awakening is for everybody in it.
A: Yes, and we can actually experience, experientially recognize these sages, these values of intelligence as sort of literally encircling us and being in a support network or support system, you know, where Divinity is flowing into these deeper degrees of resolution and purification.
And as you said before, it’s not like, oh, you can turn a blind eye and say that’s going on out there, it’s actually happening inside of your body as infinity. So there’s no possibility of ignoring or bypassing.
D: Or getting a break.
A: Breaks are not optional. It’s easy to say this is what you want from a certain perspective. And of course, in the heart it is. But it’s something that comes with a tremendous impersonal responsibility and accountability.
D: Yeah.
A: So it’s really amazing how we can see that everything in terms of a full comprehensive unfoldment comes back down to healing and resolution, you know, and the willingness to be with what is arising in a way which supports its unification, which supports its conversion, which supports its being folded back into this one singular reality in a way which shows up as a greater coherence, as a greater cohesiveness.
D: Yeah, because what’s unhealed, is unresolved, is kind of a shadow. Basically it hides some quality of wholeness. And so as the healing takes place, those shadows are resolved and it all resolves back to light.
A: Yes.
D: Basically.
A: Beautiful.
D: And that’s seen, and then it can be known and that aspect of the unfolding for the whole can know that perspective of the whole, and it adds that to the whole. But that healing has to take place for that to be seen.
A: So this means that we’re not in a competition. When each perspective and each degree of unfoldment is sort of adding to that cumulative coalescing of the flowering of life within itself and that when we see each other unfolding the process, we’re seeing ourself. So we can rejoice in that seeing, we can rejoice in the profound degree of grace that is revealing itself through all of these shifts unfolding and these higher stages unfolding, higher modalities unfolding. It is such a great gift, such a great opportunity to be here in this particular time together.
D: Yes.
A: So I don’t know if I have anything else. Do you have anything else that you feel that we’ve missed?
D: Nothing comes to mind. Did we want to have some questions and such?
A: Yes, let’s open it up for questions. And if everyone, we’re going to remain on the screen, spotlighted, so we’re not going to have the video show up for those that are asking the questions, but we will be able to hear you. David and I will both be able to hear you.
So if you want to ask a specific question addressed to a specific one of us, or I know David, you know, David isn’t always available like this live in the flesh, so to speak, to ask him questions, so it’s a rare opportunity. And so if you just want to unmute yourself or sort of raise your hand and Elle will perhaps give you a signal or you could just unmute yourself one at a time and ask that question and we’ll continue to record.
Q: Hello.
A: Hey there.
Q: Hi, I’d enjoy asking a question if I could.
A: Yes, please.
Q: It’s for David. Hi, David.
D: Hi, Chris.
Q: I’m familiar with your posts, the raptures, and also 100 times the bliss. And in speaking about purification and stuff, I know, I felt that kind of fleur-de-lis pattern you speak of with the heart, but I had a different experience and I thought I’d seen it on your blog but I couldn’t find it, where there was something to do with the heart kind of like blowing out in the back. Do you know anything about that?
D: Yeah, there’s various, what happens with most of us is we, because of the nature of our, of the collective experience, our experience of being in the world, is we develop a crust around the heart. And so part of that process of awakening the heart is breaking that crust.
And allows, and then the heart can get essentially bigger than the body, and well, it can actually become infinite. And then there’s kind of this movement of forward and backwards. It’s kind of like the different levels. The chakras are experienced different ways, like there can be experienced as kind of like a geometry or like a flower or like a vortex or a kind of a vortex funnel on the different levels.
But in the, you know, from a floral perspective, it’s kind of like there’s this flower that’s there and it has roots going back. And so depending on how that unfolds, it may unfold in awareness, or it may unfold as a kind of a, like it may unfold gently or may unfold suddenly and as more of a breaking open or something like that and there’s a huge number of variations of how that might unfold. I mean I’ve written a few articles on the heart and it kind of became this thing where there’s this way, and there’s this, and there’s like there’s the anahata chakra and there’s the hridaya, the high heart, as it’s sometimes called, or the it’s kind of like a higher resolution value of the heart, and there’s the kind of a secondary chakra up here, and there’s one over here, and there’s all those kind of layers, it’s this whole infrastructure around the heart area, like the fleur-de-lis pattern that, which I did some research on, that turned out to go way back before the French, and there’s kind of this energy flow that, and they would wear the fleur-de-lis on the chest because it kind of represented that, the masculine and feminine and so on.
Yeah, so there’s a number of ways that might unfold, but certainly breaking open can certainly be an experience in a number of different ways.
Q: Okay, thank you very much. It’s not easy to find people to talk to you about that.
Q: Okay, maybe I can ask something. So I’d like to ask about this transition where, you know, when the heart becomes kind of more universally loving and this gets reflected in the relationships, in the kind of ordinary relationships which like even were you know the egoically dominated in our proximity
D: yeah, even with before the heart opening, when we shared our, tendency to, like a lot of the time we have kind of these habits that in our relationships where we see them certain way. And so we have this habit, these habits of relating and habits of automatic response without, you know, we’re reacting to our expectations of the person we’re with. And so in that process of, even just the awakening itself, those kind of things fall away. And, you know, if we’re being conscious about it, and healing also, and then we see through those stories we might have about somebody and we’re just able to be with them as they are there.
And then there’s a whole other level that can come to that when the heart awakens. And then we’re able to express levels of love and compassion that are far greater than, you know, individual. Now it’s interesting to note on this too, is that we have this, we talked a little bit about integration, and we have this capacity that’s far beyond what we might expect. Chris mentioned, for example, the thousand times the bliss or the raptures and stuff. There’s this really interesting process that can happen where we open to another level of bliss or another, and there’s huge waves of intense happiness, or in the case of the heart, intense love. And then in a relatively short period of time, it becomes the new normal, and it becomes our new platform.
And then we’re in a place where a whole other level can open from there. And it’s kind of, one of those interesting things, I mean, one of the terms they use for an established Self-realization, initial awakening, is Sat-Chit-Ananda, or in the Buddhist context, Nirvana. And Sat-Chit-Ananda essentially means absolute bliss consciousness, where bliss is definitely a part of the common experience. And that can be very in-your-face sometimes, even to the point of being a rapturous, where it just overwhelms. Not in a negative way, of course, but just, you know, very, very happy. And then that becomes the new normal.
And it’s like before, I mean, there can be these places where we have this big wave of happiness, and then it passes as an experience. But in terms of bliss itself, the celestial level, kind of two up from consciousness in the Kosha, seven level Kosha model, is essentially a field of bliss. And as that, through refinement and healing, as that opens to our awareness, essentially that is just there all the time, to some value. I mean, certainly it can get overshadowed a little bit by stronger purification or whatever, that’s going on in our life. It’s not necessarily in our face all the time. But it’s kind of, you know, if we stop for a moment, the consciousness is there, the bliss is there, and it’s like the attention on it, and it just becomes an ongoing background. So it’s a, so it’s kind of that difference between a taste where we have the experience and it falls back, and this is true of just about any aspect of this, and when it becomes ongoing, to some value of ongoing, where it’s, that value, there’s been sufficient healing and the experience, and so that value has opened in the awareness and becomes ongoing. Not that it’s not like, you know, experiencing this glass, it’s there and then I put my attention over there and it’s not in my attention. It’s kind of in the same way, the bliss is kind of there, but it can be in the background or it could be in the foreground or whatever like that.
It’s not like we’re dysfunctional. Although,
you know, if we go through a wave of of rapture or something then we could be a little dysfunctional for a bit of time. There’s a couple people that I recall have joked about you hoping that those kind of things don’t happen in public. One of the early, uh, Buddha at the Gas Pump interviews that Rick did, one of the fellows, Tom Traynor, shared a story of, he was in the front row of a large public event and when he had a rapturous experience and made a bit of noise. So it’s not the ideal place for that, but those things come when they come, again not according to our convenience.
A: I can say a couple things about that too, Tomek. So I’m sure you’ve heard me speak recently about the play of concealment and and revealment, or what I might also call the presence absence principle, where there does seem to be this concealment of presence within an apparent absence through self-definitions and the conscious experiencing. Then there seems to be a progressive revealment of presence and there’s degrees of presence and absence and what could be seen as like a mixture in a certain sense.
So what we taste as love or as bliss or as compassion is constantly evolving or are being revealed in higher orders, we might say or higher values. And in that context there’s also you know the unfoldment that pertains to the unification and the integration of that and its reflection in the nervous system. So the physiology becomes more acclimatized to that, which is what David was just talking about, and more clearly reflects it as a sort of a non-durational continuousness. So it’s not within the context of beginnings or endings, it’s something that’s timelessly realized and recognized and shining as an aspect of what you are. And in that, we also have, you know, how that shows up in the conscious experiencing and the flow of experiencing itself. And when it comes to love, I found that, you know, depending on the, how would we say, the inclination or the phase or the stage or the background, we can begin to taste, you know, certain flows of devotional love just in the midst of daily experiencing with any human being. I mean just checking out at the cash register, at the store, you know, driving, seeing someone at the red light, just a quick glance, and we’ll come to see that that hand of Divinity is actually sort of working underneath all of that, that there’s this very sweet benevolent flow of love that is finding its way and sort of tasting itself.
And we’ll also find that there are many that are scared of that, that back away from it. Because in egoic dominance that’s not something that we’re familiar with. We’re not familiar with that kind of love and it can be uncomfortable or feel kind of weird or you know what’s going on there. And there’s a tendency to personalize love, you know to make it into an exchange or a transaction that’s taking place between me and you, you know and here and there. And so that’s one thing to watch out for on some level is just to have an awareness of the tendency for there to be a personalization of that impersonal flow of love and to recognize that there’s different degrees of comfort with that.
But also, I’m not suggesting in any way whatsoever that there’s any kind of control mechanism set up or resistance to it, but it’s just sort of an intelligent awareness of how its operation or its sort of revelation more appropriately can be as cohesive as possible.
And in a certain sense what’s also taking place is that as that residue is clearing or being converted through transmutation, the film that was covering the conscious experiencing is being cleared and so we are seeing that love shining through, shining through the eyes of others, shining through the conscious experiencing of ourself and you know and in certain cases, in your case there’s no others you know it’s not an other, particularly but that continues to unfold that revelation continues to deepen. And as a part of that we’re also, you know, surrendering or there is a surrendering of the previous recognition of what love is, the previous recognition of what compassion is, you know. So there’s maybe a way in which it’s showing up for a while and that is how it is. And then there’s a threshold point I found that is reached and there’s a call for that to be surrendered.
And this is where we may touch into any kind of subtle attachments that have developed to bliss or to love or to anything like that. And so those points are very supportive and they’re just continuous, you know, because and as that is surrendered, then a new degree of intensity is shining forth, a deeper recognition. And the love can become so intense that it has to spontaneously mediates itself.
Because otherwise, to make simple eye contact with someone can be…
[Laughter]
So I found there was a certain stage where I didn’t… The body was always looking down, you know. in the grocery store, don’t want to look at anybody ’cause you end up just flowering in that. And like I said, it’s not always welcomed. So there’s just a flow of intelligence that’s finding its way in that context.
And I found that having a worshipful attitude where it’s seen that that love is the reflection Divinity within itself, even in the midst of what appear to be relationships that are defined in just mundane roles or whatever the case may be, to allow that to be recognized as a lelic flow of love. And we can begin to see that as divine play, as love tasting itself, seeing itself, knowing itself in a very, very sweet way. And this has actually been spoken about in many ways, but in particular in certain devotional traditions within the understanding of what they call bhavas or rasas.
And there are these different flavors of love that seem to be referential to different roles like brotherly love, motherly love, loving as a lover, you know, there’s all these different flavors and that can show up in a very impersonal way in its highest, in its higher degrees of revealment and it can be seen as a way in which Divinity is self-interacting within its own light within conscious awareness, the effulgence that is shining forth from itself and yeah it’s a very profound gift and opportunity you know.
D: yeah it’s interesting how it unfolds. You may find that devotion is kind of this really foreign kind of idea. Like a lot of people develop a bit of a resistance to the such ideas from their early experience with church or something like that, obligations or whatever, and you know, see, you know, devotion is kind of like this blind faith thing or something like that.
But when you reach a place where, like when I, in the God consciousness process with the awakening heart, that higher value of the heart, for me it was like having this giant fire hose blasting out of my chest and it’s like it needed some direction to flow to because we’re just kind of blasting all over the place. And so that’s where then in that stage, I mean later on it evolves, but in that stage there can be the need for an object of devotion, a place to put that. So yeah, you’re not randomly pouring on people where it’s not so welcome, because it can trigger purification in other people when you blast them like that. So it’s not necessarily comfortable. So yeah, there’s that point.
And then it depends there on what you’re comfortable with doing. Like in the traditions, they talk, for example, about devotion to God. So where you have your, you know, your Ishta Devata I mentioned before, your form of God that you most relate to as an object of devotion, or sometimes your teacher. But that has to be in an appropriate kind of way, not as a, it’s not a hero worship kind of thing. This is like a flowing of Self to itself.
And then there’s sometimes the one’s partner, mate, can be a suitable object of devotion if they’re comfortable with that kind of intensity. But it depends on, you know, all the dynamics where that directs. So it’s even, and this is even with people who, you know, some people have a more analytical approach to this process and some people are more, what’s the word, karma yogis, they work stuff out through doing, that’s kind of their dominant, everybody has a bit of all of it, but even in sort of people who aren’t as devotionally oriented, there can be very devotional periods that arise because of those kinds of openings, where there’s still, we still have to meet those needs. And it’s a, yeah, it’s kind of an amazing process.
A: Yeah. David and I are planning on having a talk on devotion specifically in a couple weeks, I think.
Q: Hello. Hey. Peter. I wanted to ask about, as the realization becomes more and more universal, it seems like there’s still always going to be that which is unresolved within it, that which is structured in the denial of light or whatever. And I was just wondering if you could speak about how that is held, especially from pure Divinity, and also maybe like how does that remain? How is it and is it just like always like perpetually there that there’s you know maybe lower astral material but it’s not always in full, in awareness or I don’t know if you could just speak on that.
A: Sure, I can start David. There’s a, what comes to mind as you ask about that, Pete, is the the oft quoted and famous Bodhisattva vow which is goes something like this, “sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them all.” So in that vow there’s a recognition that although there are numberless sentient beings, I vow to save them all.
Now that would seem to not make sense, you know, intellectually. How can you save all of the numberless beings when there isn’t a particular number? And what we come to see is that the principle that’s being expressed there is the principle of perpetual surrender or perpetual service. So that is itself, the vow is the power of itself. It’s not a literal activity. It’s that degree of commitment, that degree of willingness and that degree of surrender, which doesn’t see some point of stopping and doesn’t see a need for there to be a point of stopping because as you said, there’ll always be another planet. There’ll always be another, you know, always be, there have always been apparently these things.
From the perspective of pure Divinity, we see that they’re not actually there in the way they seem to be. So it’s always within the realm of appearance, yet it still continues to seem to flow. It still continues to spontaneously, naturally, pour itself into itself for the sake of pouring itself into itself.
What I found is that it isn’t about there being this kind of place where we can say, all right there that’s finished, you know we reached the goal of getting all the darkness out of here, or whatever the case may be, yeah the sweetness of it is in just the the churning and the turning of that wheel which knows no limits, it knows no time, it knows no end, it isn’t concerned with that.
And it is just perpetually revealing, you know, its love and its power and its grace and its glory for the sake of revealing its love and its power and its grace and its glory.
Now, you know, David, I’m sure will fill you in on the on the yugic perspective and kind of the understanding of cycles of time and how there are different degrees of light and and revealment. And from a Vedic perspective, how there’s creations and dissolutions that are sort of continuously unfolding. And so in that respect, there is a point where the seeming darkness of this universe will be no more, because the seemingness of this universe will be no more.
But we also have the potential to cognize beyond just this universe and this multiverse and those kinds of things. It’s not an often talked about subject, but it is very possible and very much unfolding and will continue to unfold on this planetary system, particularly now, particularly now, since we’re entering into a much more refined time, an age of grace.
So I don’t know if you have anything to say around that, David?
D: Yeah, just a little bit more. One of the things that’s key in this is the relative balance. There needs to be some value of shadow for there to be this appearance of form and for experiences to unfold and stuff like that. But in the cycles of time…
I don’t want to get into the whole yuga thing at this point, but just kind of like this, essentially there’s seasons in consciousness, just as there’s seasons and you know annual seasons and so on. And so these cycles of rising and and falling consciousness. And the golden age and silver ages are like three quarters of the time, but we’re now in a time we’re just rising out of a darker age.
And so the relative balance of shadow is greater at the moment. And that’s led to our current experience. So what we’re trying to do is shift some of that shadow out, clear it out and raise the experience so that the sattva becomes dominant instead of the tamas guna.
The clarity, the purity, the flow of love and bliss and so on become much more prominent than they have been in the last few thousand years.
A: Yeah, beautiful. So this is, Pete, this is kind of what I was referring to with the presence absence principle the play of concealment and revealment. And from a transmutated perspective, what this means is that there’s more food on the table. And so we’re hungry. Yeah, we’re hungry. So it also means that there’s more lead to be revealed as gold. And there’s a sweetness in that revelation that is for its own sake. It isn’t based in the typical human understanding of like fixing things, because it’s not in pure Divinity you don’t see anything that needs fixing.
Pure Divinity doesn’t see anything needing fixing at the same time it isn’t some sort of, you know there, you recognize that in order for there to be evolution, there doesn’t have to be an underlying sense of imperfection. That evolution can flower from perfection, imperfection for its own sake. So I don’t have to feel like something is wrong or out of place in order for there to be a movement to go beyond it, in order for there to be a natural inclination for its resolution. That’s one of the major limitations is we have learned that that is a motivation. We need to feel that something is wrong or imperfect in order to make it better, in order to fix it. And we’ll come to find, and we are coming to find, that that motivation is severely disempowered and lacking in potency and oftentimes actually ends up feeding back into a loop which just goes round and round and round and round, without any real degree of resolution taking place. I mean,
it’s there but it’s, you know, slight and accompanied by lots of recondensation and things. So our motivation can be one of love. It can be one of for its own sakeness and willingness and commitment and devotion and just the natural inclination towards evolution.
Q: Thank you, very beautiful.
A: Thank you.
Q: I have a question.
A: Yes.
Q: So, I’m just wondering, as these cycles of time continue, it seems like, I guess, Rama and Krishna in the stories came back to kind of, or, you know, they came to kind of prepare the ground so that when that dark age comes that, you know, mankind can kind of pass through it with a certain level of support and you can kind of see that in, you know, the work that’s been done by the great sages and such to kind of like, you know, allow for, yeah, like mankind to pass through that dark age with, you know, that kind of foundation still in place in some regard. So my question is, I don’t know if there’s been much talk about how like, is it always kind of back to zero as that cycle of time or as, as the, as the planet and the collective consciousness slowly kind of unifies like on different levels.
Right now we may be seeing it as like, you know, kind of different representations like for instance this Zoom call. You know, it’s like there’s a sense of there, you know, a unification of the planet happening on, you know, right now on like a more gross level. But as that consciousness grows, is there the possibility that like the next dark age wouldn’t be like kind of the same thing, you know, it’s kind of, it would be, it would maybe be darker, but it wouldn’t be quite the same thing that happened in the past here on this planet.
So that’s my question.
D: Yeah, there’s a few ways of looking at it. Each cycle is a little different because of the trends, of the way the sub-cycles are running and just the kinds of experiences that have unfolded and so on. But one of the things to recognize also though is the appearance of cycles is part of the appearance.
It’s part of the way things seem to be flowing, in the way the learning process is taking place. But from a higher perspective, that cycle is just an appearance that has already all happened. It’s kind of like from a divine perspective it was kind of like a brief moment, kind of a brief thought, and the Divine is so comprehensive that it includes, you know, many universes and gazillions of beings and so forth in this apparent cycle and so on like that. And so you might think of it like, you know, we’re a point of experience and for us to experience, you know, Divinity is just too vast for a point to experience. And so we have, we kind of experience this value, this immediate quality of divinities that are more localized. And in that, then we get experience of having space and time and an apparent sequence of unfolding and cycles of rising and falling and this kind of thing as a mechanism for the point to unfold it, but from a larger perspective that’s not actually…
it’s a mechanism for the experience to take place and it’s not sort of the highest reality of it, but it’s sort of meaningless to talk about in and of itself because that’s not how we experience the world because we are experiencing it through, the vast majority of people anyways, are experiencing it through a point value.
So it’s not, I mean the quality of it is that the Dark Age is the shortest period and that, where the golden age is by far the longest, so more than four times the dark. And the other part of what’s going on is kind of a bit out of cycle. Krishna talked about it just before he dropped the body, and some other sages have talked about it as well. We’re kind of in this, we’re in a rising cycle towards a golden age, but there’s a number of thousands of years before that golden age is expected to be here. We’re kind of in this model, we’re kind of in what’s called the Dvapara or the energy age. And you see like the discovery of electricity and energy healing and this kind of, you know, various kinds of things around energy awareness, developing and a lot of technology and those are one of the major qualities of the period.
But because of this, other aspects of the cycle that’s going on, we have this opportunity to go directly towards a Golden Age in a much faster way than usual. So essentially, we’ll have a golden age right through the next scheduled golden age and you know so for a longer period and when I was, when I first learned to meditate one of the teachers I spoke to at the time talked about the opportunity was there but he didn’t know whether we were going to make it or not, or whether we get lost in the shadow or whether we break through and and have that shift and it became apparent to several spiritual teachers at the time talked about it, that it became apparent that we managed to hit the transition point and make that shift. And so there’s been this gradual unfolding of that.
And, you know, of course, when I first started to meditate, this idea of awakening was a wonderful thing. And, you know, there was some talk that it would take about five, five, ten years kind of a thing. But I’m not sure if the 20-somethings of those days would have been happy to hear that it would take 40. But, you know, now it’s actually flowering and there’s all these people who have been meditating for decades who are awakening now and that’s clearing the ground also for other people to awaken much more quickly and easily.
And so this transition is accelerating. And Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was one of the teachers I mentioned, and he saw there was this kind of wave of awakening that started in around 2006. There certainly was, it was gradually accelerating, but it picked up quite a bit more dramatically then.
And he dropped the body in 2008, basically saying that his work was done. He’d spread the seeds around the world and gotten all these millions of people meditating and made meditation a more household word and so on. And so many people took up various forms of practice and so on and that’s really started to bear fruit then. So we’re kind of now in this, moved into this more intense transitional period.
And I couldn’t tell you how long this is going to take.
Because it kind of, there’s sort of free will is still in play there on a certain level where people can choose how they respond to, like there’s a lot of stuff coming to the surface in the collective, and people can choose to get involved in the dramas and you know, make a big fuss and suffer, or they can choose to heal and see it as an opportunity for healing. And there’s some of both going on.
And so it’s really valuable to recognize that that’s what’s going on, So that there is an opportunity for healing, ’cause otherwise we just, there can be that tendency to fall into the drama and it can look like the world’s kind of falling apart in certain ways.
But it’s really a part of this much grander healing going on to prepare the ground so that this can be lived by far more people. And it’s gonna change the world in all kinds of ways, because consciousness gets to a certain point. It’s kind of like there’s kind of phase transition points where we get to another level.
It’s kind of like, you know, the awakening goes through stages. We reach a certain point and then there’s a shift and then we gradually embody that, the same kind of process is going to take place on the collective. And people in general will live as if, at a certain point when there’s enough people awake, clearly awake and established, everybody’s going to experience life as if they’re awake, even if they’re not. I mean, that kind of, you know, it’s not established in their physiology, just because it’s kind of the collective is essentially awake.
And so that process, I have no idea how long it’s going to take, but you know, some that are much wiser than myself, they’re suggesting it’s going to be within our lifetimes, but we’ll see. It’ll be really interesting to watch this unfolding. So we’re kind of in a bumpier phase in some ways at the moment, but it’s like a phase transition thing. You come out the other side, and it’s kind of like it clicks over at a certain point and then it becomes much more obvious to everybody. Like right now it’s not at all obvious to most people but at a certain point it will be.
A: Beautiful David. Now Gesh, I can say a couple things on that too. Just on that last point you made David, we can come to recognize turbulence as oftentimes being a precursor to a collapse into a deeper recognition of reality or a sign that things are moving, so to speak.
Things are stirring and that stirring has the potential to flower in a certain way. It’s evolutionary in its nature. I tend to feel that all four of the yugic periods are going on simultaneously on multiple levels, simultaneously in the sense that David was talking about just generally from the already done-ness, but then also simultaneously on our current sort of collective condition. So we have those that are in a golden age, we have those that are in energy age, we have those that are in a silver age, we have those that are in an iron age, all simultaneously together and there’s a dominant age in the midst of that.
And that dominant age is what is classically referred to as the age, but within the context of that there’s simultaneous yugic unfoldment, perspectives according to different groups, different levels of conscious experiencing.
D: Yeah, that’s more on the level of the feminine side there, the purification and healing.
A: Beautiful, yeah. So, the one thing that’s important to note is that everything is recorded automatically within the Self, within the field of conscious awareness. Nothing is forgotten. Everything is recorded. And so this can shed a little bit more light on the on the perspective of the of yugas and unfoldment and what David was talking about is that Divinity, that actualization of the potentiality of the light of Divinity, is touching in to every possible actualization of itself, touching into every possible configuration of itself.
It’s experiencing itself as the unfoldment of various dimensional configurations and situations, circumstances, you know, from innumerable vantage points simultaneously. Yeah, and all of that is recorded. So on the level of that actualization, it’s perpetually in process because it’s infinite. At the same time, it’s complete. So I often speak about how it’s simultaneously complete yet apparently in process. The in process aspect is apparent, you know, from the perspective of the completion it’s not going on or it’s already gone on and is just there, you know. So, but from the perspective of the point value and from the perspective of the process, it does seem to be going on, but in that seeming we can be established in the completion, while it still seems to be unfolding. Yeah, that completion is established in itself. We aren’t as individuals, separate individuals, but as the one that is established within its own realization of completion.
So you’ve perhaps heard me speak about the tension threshold collapse function, which is the way that I describe the flow of conscious experiencing, through the primary distinction of pure awareness and conscious presence. And every time that the tension is a potentiality which is collapsing into actuality, collapsing into configurations of itself, and that is recorded. Every collapse is recorded. And that tension threshold collapse function is flowing at a rate that is imperceivable by many. Yeah, and that is an infinite recording network, an infinite recording system.
And the Vedas have spoken about this. They’ve spoken about a concept that David would be able to tell you more about called Smriti, which is like cosmic memory.
D: Yeah, exactly.
A: And so this kind of begins to shed some awareness on the intelligence that’s at work here that is appearing to unfold as these different cycles. And you know, I mean, goodness gracious, if you look into the Vedic understanding of the cyclical emergence of potential, it’s like amazing. This one’s within this one’s, within this one’s, you know, within the… and it just unfolds like that. And all of that is recorded. It’s all recorded, recorded, recorded. And so a dark age is going to be different than the previous dark age. Nothing is predetermined. There’s likelihood and probability and higher degrees and lesser degrees of that. But everything is self-experiencing, self-evolving, self-creating. And the conscious experiencing seems to be finding its own way in the context of a particular phase of unfoldment of that potential. And that is a fresh recording of these unique conglomerations of, you know, perspective and conditions and all of those different things. Yeah. So that kind of is something that I would take into consideration in that regard.
D: Yeah. That’s a big question.
A: I have to do a whole talk on that one.
Q: That was really great. David, so good to see you on here. Yeah, take care. Thank you.
Q: So here’s a little question and that is, can we do this again?
A: Yes, David, do you think we can do this again?
D: Oh, sure. Yeah.
Q: It’s such a great format, both, you know, just in terms of our being present, as you were saying at the very beginning, Andrew, and sorry, somebody just started a leaf blower out here. But also, just because we have the two backgrounds, the two of you with, you know, with the different approaches. I’m a TMer like David is, so it’s really wonderful to see, particularly your approach, Andrew, with respect to masculine, feminine, and your observation of development and awakenings through the, let’s call it the feminine Shakti path and something that we sort of didn’t grow up with in our approach. So it’s really great to see these different perspectives. So I really appreciate it. Thank you.
A: Yeah, thank you. I think it’d be wonderful for us to do this again, David. Maybe in August would be a good time for us to set something up. David and I are also already going to be recording something at the first of July. So we’ll plan to do another one of these in August.
D: Yeah, we have another group conversation coming up too.
A: Yeah, oh yeah, that’s right, yeah, David and Dorothy and I are also going to be recording another conversation on individuality. So, thank you for that suggestion.
Yeah, profound, profound silence. It’s alive, flowing.
D: It’s alive!
[Laughter]
D: Sorry.
A: That’s all right, watch out. Get hit with one of those raptures.
Okay, well, thank you so much, my friend, for taking the time to speak with me and to speak with all of us.
I have some comments here. “You guys are just so wonderful. Thank you so much for doing this.” “It’s a beautiful frequency to experience. Material on pure Divinity is hard to come by.” “So it’s literally a godsend to hear you both.” That is true.
D: Yeah, most of the pure Divinity stuff is devotional, basically.
A: Yes.
D: It’s more poetic.
A: But less and less will it be hard to come by. As it’s coming through here, it’s making its way into formation, into expression in a more clearly delineated format.
D: Yeah, it’s worth noting in that regard too, that there’s lots of people who are awake, that their dharma or their way of embodying it is not about teaching or writing or any kind of way, they just live it and bring their contribution to the whole in their own way. And so, it takes sufficient numbers of people to have those, the ones that are kind of, you know, talking about it more directly and that kind of thing. It’s not just the people talking about it that are living it. There’s vastly more people who are awake than are out there, invisible.
A: Yeah, so it’s a supply and demand situation. So the call and response when the call comes forward, the response is drawn out, you know, it’s not merely for, you know, pleasure, although it’s not unpleasurable.
Okay, thank you all so much. Thank you. All right. Thank you, David. Bye.